The thought of an individual insurance mandate has never sat very well with many supporters of healthcare reform. Particularly now that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) unveiled his committee’s health care bill today with zero Republican support. Baucus’s bill — which former Cigna executive Wendell Potter has referred to as “an absolute gift” to the health insurance industry — includes no public option, an individual insurance mandate, and the creation of health care co-ops

The number of Democrats immediately rose in opposition to Baucus’s bill and that is a good sign. I think that those in favor of healthcare reform have been clear that there can be no real reform with out a public option to compete with the private sector medical insurance companies. To now mandate that all Americans carry health with the companies that are the reason that pushing for healthcare reform to begin with is mind-boggling. Thankfully Dems are rejecting this madness loud and clear.

“It’s a good product,” Conrad said on CNBC. “It is an attempt by the chairman to lay out what he thinks reflects best the discussions over this extended period of time. And I think the chairman has done a good job of capturing where the talks are at this point.” [...]Conrad’s support for Baucus’s health care bill is unsurprising, given the fact that it includes his co-op proposal that he introduced shortly after a meeting with the nation’s largest insurer and health reform opponent UnitedHealth Group. BusinessWeek reported on the meeting last month:

United Health is generally well received in legislative circles in Washington. In late May its in-house point man on reform, Simon Stevens, hand-delivered a report to key senators detailing ways to save an estimated $540 billion in federal spending over 10 years.

A week later, on June 4, Stevens accompanied UnitedHealth’s chief executive, Stephen J. Hemsley, to a meeting with Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), an influential moderate member of the Senate Finance Committee. Conrad has since led an effort to create nonprofit medical cooperatives that would operate much like utility co-ops as a substitute for a federally run plan. With less heft than a proposed national plan, the state medical cooperatives would pose a far weaker competitive threat to private insurers.